Dungeons and towns share a similar art style -- which is the predominate choice throughout the game. Although Tales has now moved to 3D, it still recalls its 2D sprite based heritage with a cel-shaded anime art style. While everything looks distinctly cartoony, it's also very detailed. Each town and dungeon has a distinct look regardless of whether it's a port town or a fire shrine. An amazing amount of detail shows off wood grains, speckled flagstones, creepy undergrowth, lapping waves, and light refracting off stained glass. Characters are all well modeled and unique. The somewhat clunky animation (complete with Harvest Moon styled emotion bubbles) perfectly fits the art style. Tales of Symphonia is simply a piece of art.

The towns themselves are places where the storyline progresses, clues are unearthed, and Ex Gems, status supplies, armor and weaponry, and save points can be found. Within each town, it's also likely that you'll be asked to run various errands (such as obtaining a potion for someone), need to dispatch the occasional villain, and partake in a few mini-games.

Mini-games are only uncovered by thoroughly exploring areas (which includes talking to all the NPCs). While they do serve as diversions, for the most part you'll be more than happy to continue on your journey rather then sit through simple quizzes, memorization challenges, or the stunning game of red light green light.

Which leads us to one of Tales' largest problems -- the difficulty. Instead of a steady curve, you'll find a scatter plot. It's all over the map. You'll encounter rather stupid mini-games and dungeon challenges late in the game, but early on you'll be confronted by brutally hard boss battles that force you to spend an hour simply leveling up your characters. You might have just solved a tedious block pushing puzzle, fought your way to a seal, battled a boss for 20 minutes, defeated it, and are about to exit the dungeon when you suddenly have to fight another boss. All without saving.

If you die -- either because you didn't have enough experience or used your items too freely -- you'll have to play through the entire dungeon again (and most likely again). It's frustrating, especially because you're hit with this one two combo on multiple occasions. What makes it worse is that Tales' linear but relatively free to roam around nature allows you to enter dungeons in various orders. It's quite easy to be confronted by a dungeon whose mere minions can kill your entire party. Unlike RPGs that feature random encounters, you can choose whether or not to egage in battle (if you avoid an enemies' movement pattern you don't have to fight), which means there's no way of gauging how many enemies you should be killing.

Fighting is fun though, which makes the requisite leveling up for certain bosses enjoyable. Unlike your typical RPG, Tales of Symphonia uses a real-time battle system. You still have to initiate fights. You still fight with your party. But instead of using a command input system, you're directly controlling one of your character's movements. Different variations of a directional and the A and B buttons initiate different attacks. You can also block, counter, and recover from blows. What's interesting is that while TOS' battles are in 3D, you're locked to a 2D plane dependent on who your character is locked onto (you can really only move forwards and backwards on one plane until you switch targets).

Depending on your character, you'll either have magic or strike skills (special attacks), which consume technical points and are generally more powerful than your normal strike. Once a gauge is filled, you can use these technical skills to unleash a unison attack on a targeted enemy (all characters attack at once). Certain combinations of techs will result in powerful new moves -- which means that you're encourage to experiment with attacks (and there are a lot of combinations)

Character's skills are developed in a couple ways. Traditional experience points will give you access to new moves and statistics. Installing Ex Gems -- performance enhancing jewels that give your characters super human strength -- occasionally unlock new attacks and always bestow some new skill whether its better accuracy or a new combo. But the most interesting inclusion is the ability to learn skills. By using certain combinations of attacks and repeatedly using the same attack, characters learn new abilities (often times a combination of two frequently used skills). You have full control over what skills characters use in battle (useful when adjusting to various elemental bosses), unison attacks, and hot spells (c-stick activated healing or attacks) in the menu system.

Computer controlled character actions can also be set to different levels of aggressiveness, attack styles (magic vs. strike), and how willing they are to assist you in battle. This helps with adjusting to different boss types and difficulties. Or if you have friends about, up to three others can join in for battles. It's plug and play technology -- simply plug in a controller to activate multiplayer. But even though multiple people fight, only one player can move about Sylvarant/Tethe'alla -- which can leave long periods of boredom for players two-four who aren't invested in the story.

Even though Tales features a real-time battle system, which at first seems a lot like button mashing, it involves a lot of strategy. Knowing your enemy and your party's fighting styles is key to victory. Adjusting elemental spells, choosing powerful attackers vs. support types, or even whether to hang back and use items or be the leading attacker are important decisions that can turn the tide of battle. The action heavy battle system offers more than simple playability.